For years, I have thought about moving to the countryside. Don’t get me wrong, I love the city. I love my friends here, the ICG community, Do-Rite Donuts, my swim team, and the lake. I love the walkability, the seasons, the CTA. But there is a force in the city that weighs me down. A force that until recently I had blamed on living in a metropolitan area. A weight I suspect we all feel. I am referring to the churn – the hustle and bustle, the work work work – that seems to define much of the American experience.

In my (probably) naive mind, the countryside is somewhat divorced from that churn. It’s a fantastical place of nature and play where I could live my ultimate Stardew Valley fantasy. At least that has been my experience of the Australian countryside where much of my extended family lives.

As a chronically part-time and self-employed individual, I do not work a traditional 9-5, but that does not mean I am protected against the churn. Living in the city, I constantly compare myself to my colleagues with more traditional jobs and in that comparison, I never feel like I’m working hard enough. Hell, even independent of that comparison I fear I’m not working hard enough. When your survival is on the line, it’s a hard feeling to escape.

In the past I blamed this feeling on urban life, and this year, I decided enough was enough. Why did I have to move to the countryside to find my peace? There must be other ways to escape the churn, other means of withstanding its current. And there are. I found them through developing an intentional relationship with place, one where I play more within my environment.

The first step was to disempower societal expectations of how I should behave. These expectations are artificial rules that make life way more boring and limit my experience in the city. Am I, a fully-grown man, supposed to climb a tree in the park? Maybe not, but it’s not hurting anyone and it’s really not that serious. Fuck what others are doing or what I feel like I’m supposed to do.

The seed of that disempowering was planted by my swim team. We frequently swim in the lake during the summer, which feels…not allowed? I’m often a bit embarrassed jumping into the water in my little Speedo amongst the many non-swimmers walking along the lakefront. But every time I get out of the water, I feel so empowered and connected to this place – to the lake, to the city, to the seasons, to all those swimmers before me and to those ahead.

But this idea of connecting to place through play really began to take root early last winter. During a walk through a cemetery, I found a persimmon tree absolutely loaded with ripe fruit. My thoughts went like this:

Is it okay to pick them? Surely, I’m not allowed, they must be for…all the ghosts? That can’t be right. What if I just picked one? Surely no one would notice. Oh wow, they’re really ripe and – Wow, that’s tasty. Okay, maybe just a few more. What if I bring some back? I should probably pick enough to make something, or at least enough to share with my downstairs neighbors.

As I loaded my arms with fresh persimmons and snow began to fall, I thought about how I was in the graveyard, really in this place, engaging with a single tree, giggling as my fingers got sticky with jam and cold in the frost. What a fun way to exist in this place. Sorry to the ghosts my joy may have offended.

I later used the fruit to bake a dessert for my friends and couldn’t help but think about how if life were a video game, graveyard-persimmon bread pudding would offer one hell of a stat boost.

Moving into this year, I wanted to tap a maple tree. I have wanted to tap a tree for years. People have drunk the sap of random trees for thousands of years when the days are warm and the nights are cold, but it always felt out of reach to me, like some kind of riddle. But not this year. Not anymore.

During the first warm week of February, some spirit moved through me and inspired me into action, as if yelling: “This is your window! The trees bleed now!”

I grabbed a drill, my spile, and a hammer. I prepared my sap container – a lemonade pitcher wrapped in my old roommate’s abandoned macrame string – went outside to a tree I knew was a maple and made my move. I was equal parts thrilled and embarrassed. Here I was, drilling into the trunk of a parkway maple and hammering in a small metal tube all to drink its sweet blood.

No one does this. Surely everyone knows I’m breaking some rule I’ve never heard of.

But the new me, the one post-disempowerment, is okay with feeling embarrassed and scared. Trying new things will often feel embarrassing and scary, but that’s a part of the process. Once I let those feelings move through me, the world of possibility really opened up.

I quickly realized that this level of play wasn’t just limited to my natural environment, although it is the one I’m more easily drawn to. Chicago has endless opportunities to explore cultural practices – classes, concerts, stores, clubs, hobby groups, and more.

I started taking ballet classes a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely terrible. I’m one of two guys in the class and I move like a brick. I’m having so much fun. 

This month I plan to take a stained glass class and I’m making garden beds out of old wooden pallets to go in my Wrigleyville building’s yard.

Besides that, I’m also working on getting access to my roof in the spring for some morning yoga. I need a ladder (and an abundance of caution) but I know you can go up there.

Some of these ideas might seem obvious if you’re someone who still has their childhood sense of play. For those of us that get swept up in the never-ending current of work, though, we forget. Deadlines creep in, work starts piling up, and we focus on chipping away at the pile of stuff that begs for our attention. But that pile never stops growing. Never.

If you’re exhausted or want a break, you need to carve out that space for yourself, because that pile of work isn’t going to vouch for you and your innate need to be a human fucking being. 

When we sink beneath the surface of jobs, deadlines, and expectations, we start to lose touch with the most human parts of ourselves. But they’re never truly out of reach. Even if we have to reach out over and over again, it will always be a joy to rediscover all the ways we can simply exist exactly where we are.